The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire

Abstract

This article sheds light on the history of anti-imperialism in the years of the global authoritarian surge of the 1930s and 1940s, looking at the evolving relations between anticolonial nationalists and the Nazi regime. At the height of the Second World War, scores of anticolonial revolutionaries flocked to Germany from North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, turning wartime Berlin into a hub of global anti-imperial revolutionary activism. Driven by the contingencies of war, German officials made increasing efforts to mobilize anti-imperial movements, reaching out to the subjects of the British and French empires and the minorities of the Soviet Union. The history of Berlin’s anticolonial nationalists illuminates the broader phenomenon of right-wing authoritarian anticolonialism that emerged in the shifting political landscape of the interwar years and reached its peak during the Second World War. In this global authoritarian moment, many anticolonial nationalists, in search of an alternative to (Wilsonian) liberalism and socialism, turned to the rising authoritarian states, which stood for the primacy of the nation and a new world order based on the nation, not multiethnic empires. Cultivating bonds across imperial, national, and ethnic boundaries, they formed a nationalist international against empire, marked by anticolonial militancy and reactionary cosmopolitanism. The article also addresses broader questions of exile politics and international patronage relations in modern history.